> The impression I get is that third-party apps are disproportionately used by the kinds of users that supply content more than average
Are you saying that most users who post content also use third-party apps, or that most third-party app users post content? There’s a big difference here.
Back of the napkin math: You have to pay to post with some third-party apps like Apollo which has 50k subscribers. Reddit has ~500M monthly users, so we’re looking at… 0.01% if every person subscribed to Apollo posts. Even with a 10x safety factor, there’s no way shutting down third-party apps has a meaningful effect on the volume of content posted to Reddit.
> People who use third party apps are outliers. They do not make Reddit any money
I'd wager that > 90% of moderators use third party apps, and they indirectly do make Reddit a lot of money. Without the moderators the entire site goes to shit.
> Third party clients seem to be fairly niche with limited usage
The question is: Who is using these clients, specifically?
1. Visually impaired people. The official reddit app has terrible screenreader support
2. The longest-term & most dedicated users to the site, who are responsible for the content that everyone else uses & who want a) ad-free browsing; and b) a better experience than the official app, which sucks
3. Moderators who require better functionality on mobile than what the official app gives
These are all communities that matter a lot, even if it's a small % of users.
> The submitters have given reddit a sublicense to publish their content, not random 3rd parties.
This is tangential no? Third party reddit apps _already_ republish end user content.
I'm not saying third party apps powered by scraping are not illegal, I'm saying they're _no more_ illegal than those powered by the official reddit API.
> or they're intentionally driving away 3rd party apps
This doesn't seem to make sense. If Reddit wanted to kill 3rd party apps, they would just disable public API access entirely. The reaction would be basically the same it seems.
> While third party app users don't directly contribute to revenue, Reddit is highly reliant on its community to produce and moderate content for free.
This is an important point. Reddit gets its content and moderation for free by their users (who often steals that content from elsewhere...), yet they consider them to cost them money?
There's another thing I haven't seen many people bring up. Like a lot of Reddit users with an older account, I use old.reddit.com together with RES. RES uses the .json endpoints for a lot of functionality, and those are considered part of Reddit's API according to them. So this is not just about third party mobile apps, the desktop experience might get seriously degraded as well. I hope it does, because the worse it gets the easier it is to quit.
>But it has an incredibly huge problem with a particular style of spam account that reposts old content on certain subreddits.
Well that's your problem right there. That type of spam boosts a number of activity and usage KPIs and increases engagement.
Reddit has even been caught using bots to artificially build out new subreddits by Google translating and reposting existing content from other subreddits to give the illusion of popularity in order to bootstrap new subs.
Why would they want to cut down on any of that when it would affect their bottom line?
> use old.reddit or third party apps are the power users
Are they?
> they all say they transitioned to a third party app
Have they? Who asked?
Im inclined to believe a lot of these things. I used to work for a large network of forums in the late 00s. We had a lot of traffic but didnt require 2000 employees (literally only 5 dev to manage 250mil monthly pageviews). In all reality we might been reddit if we got lucky, but we didnt. Oh well. So, I tend to side with the users, but I do understand the behaviors in play. Im not trying to be argumentative just to blindly support reddit, but so many people are just throwing out stats as if they are correct with zero proof. Its almost impossible to have an honest conversation when the facts are being made up on the spot. This whole situation has become so emotional.
> Every one here has a 3rd party reddit app or uses RES. (if you don't, please do).
I sometimes go long stretches without using Reddit, but I'm 100% in the second column when I use it. I've never used a 3rd party reddit app and I don't use RES. The reason is that I only ever browse Reddit on the computer (logged in, in "old" Reddit mode). If you don't browse Reddit on your phone, these aren't really necessary. (This isn't just a Reddit thing, I also don't browse Twitter, Facebook, or any other social platform on my phone. Mainly, this is because I want to avoid the dark patterns and unblockable ads of mobile apps.)
If you genuinely think that they killed their API and aren't using hyperbole, then you were misled.
They killed 3rd party apps by charging the developers of those apps on a per-request basis at a price that would have been unsustainable for them. However, these charges are only if you're logged in. You can still use 3rd party apps anonymously.
If you want to be logged in so you can post/vote/comment, there's a work-around. If you create your own client ID and put it into an existing app, then you can still use third party apps (on Android at least) [0]. I'm still using BaconReader this way.
> Those third party apps are central to how the entire content works, they're absolutely critical for the moderators that try valiantly to diver the tide of pure excrement of content that floods in to the various subreddits.
With all respect, that's something we are about to find out.
I find it hard to believe that there are so many people who think that Reddit looked at the mountain of data they have on user and mod behaviour, and API usage, and decided to do the opposite of what that data indicated as a good option.
All the internet posters making the claims you have just made are working blind. They don't have a single iota of actual data to support their conclusions.
> because those users are almost by definition power users
Why is this the case and being repeated everywhere by everyone?
Reddit originally didn't have a mobile app and only third party clients existed. Everyone who wanted a mobile experience was using a third party app. Many of those original users never switched to the official app. How are they power users by definition?
> There may be SOME percentage of the 3rd party app users who transition, but if the 3rd party traffic is as trivially small as Reddit has claimed, not sure how that will overnight magically transform them into being profitable.
he said 97% of users are on the reddit app. he also said there is a significant opportunity cost to having those 3% of users not on the app. so for both of those statements to be true that 3% of users must be very active and providing a lot of content and value.
> Reddit is not changing at all, so the vast majority of users will stay
Cutting off and/or driving up the cost of third-party apps through which users access Reddit is changing Reddit. The impression I get is that third-party apps are disproportionately used by the kinds of users that supply content more than average, so even if they are less efficiently monetized as eyeballs, they are large indirect contributors to Reddit’s revenue. Making their experience worse will, it seems near certain, cost content that brings the users that are purer eyeballs to monetize with ads, and thereby cost ad revenue. How much is, of course, unclear.
> Don’t forget that Reddit can and already did close a bunch of subreddits that they didn’t like, so it’s their community, not yours.
Sure, and they can take over the moderations, and the content creation, and the viewing for ads from the users that they chase off. Not sure how that will work out for them as a business plan, though.
Most top-level reddit posts come from bots reposting old content. Those bots aren't using the first party app...
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